Chapter Text
“Hail Mary signal detected.”
Alright, that gets my attention.
I’ve been resting my eyes in the pilot seat, and Mary’s been going on about something that, to be completely honest, I’d been mostly tuning out. Yes, Mary, I am aware of our orbit above Adrian, I don’t need the hour to hour update even if I'm in the pilot’s seat. We’re just orbiting safely, I’ve triple checked, several hundred kilometers above the planet while getting some of the Taumoeba settled.
“Signal detected” is new.
“Hey, Rocky?”
There’s the sound of a few bumps before the mentioned Eridian rolls his xenonite ball into the cockpit.
“Grace?”
“Do you hear anything out of order with Mary? No screws loose?”
After we were… all put back together physically after our fishing incident, we’ve been working on getting Mary back up to par. Needs a couple new fuel tanks, among other things. Taumoeba to breed. I thought we crossed all our t’s and dotted our i’s, but maybe something new is off?
Rocky taps his limbs and takes a close listen. “Nothing new. Should be good as when we fix last.”
Hm.
Mary chimes in. “Signal detected. Hail Mary in proximity radar.”
I scramble in my seat to get a look at - anything to clue me into what she means. Did we lose something off the ship? I slide my seat over to the ship’s exterior telescope to get a view at what we could possibly be dealing with.
Adrian’s below us. A beautiful swirl of greens. With a view like that, I can only stay a little mad at it with the little “almost killed us” fiasco. Unfamiliar constellations and the arm of the Milky Way fill the rest of my view. I start panning my view closer to Tau Ceti when I spot it.
It’s the Hail Mary.
…
That’s … unexpected.
Understatement of the millennium. I’m a biologist, not a thesaurus, darn it.
That can’t be right. I blink a few times and rub my eyes before leaning back into the telescope.
It’s still there. From what I can see, it’s a near, if not exact, replica of the same ship I’m on. I double check the radar, check the telescope, heck, I check the petrovascope (which, by the way, was unhelpful - we’re still mostly in Adrian’s Petrova line), and it’s still there.
“Uh…” I unhelpfully say. Thanks, brain, for your input. I push my glasses back up onto my face.
“What was signal from Mary, question?”
I look at Rocky. “Hey, Rock, am I awake?”
“Stupid question. Of course you are awake. Not sleeping. What is problem?”
I throw my hands out at the screen. “It looks like there’s… another ship. Another Hail Mary.”
“Good, question? Earth send another ship after you, question?”
I shake my head. “No, no, we didn’t have the fuel or the ability to do that. We wouldn’t have made this a one way trip if we didn’t have to.”
“Incoming communications,” Mary interrupts. “Would you like to view, Dr. Grace?”
“Incoming communications??” I shriek. “I didn’t know we could get communications!! Who-!!”
Alright, calm down Ryland. Panic isn’t going to help. Either you’re dreaming, or this is a thing we have to deal with for real.
I clear my throat. “Uh, put the message on the main pilot screen, Mary, please.”
“Of course, Dr. Grace. Playing back video recording.”
Static cuts to a near identical view of my own cockpit, but another person looks back at me. I do not recognize them, but they wear a near identical flight suit to the one I have tied around my waist, though mine is the white and theirs the yellow. The video output isn’t clear and static cuts around the visual, but the audio stays clear enough. A few items float behind them; their centrifuge isn’t on.
“Hello. This message is for…whoever’s out there in the other vessel. My name is Ricardo Ortiz- I- uh…, the engineer-“ they pause. The name tag on their flight suit reads Ortiz-Ishikawa. Above the embroidered name is a set of wings similar to mine, but the engineering insignia in the middle instead of my own scientific one. I suppose it’s like the one Ilyukhina had. I make a few assumptions - even against my better “you know what they say about assuming” judgement. They appear Hispanic, and based on their accent and NASA patches, they’re probably American.
“I am the engineer and acting captain of the Hail Mary. We had… an incident occur-” The person - Ricardo - is interrupted by a familiar sounding sequence of chords and notes. The source of the sounds is not present in the video. Ortiz furrows their eyebrows. There’s a few new looking cuts on their forehead.
“I didn’t think that was relevant to a greeting message.”
“♫♪♬♭♯♬♫♬.”
“I know you think you know it was a wormhole, but-”
“♬♫♬♬♩♪♪♫.” If the notes are indeed Eridian, and not just astronomically improbable coincidence, I think this would translate to “Say that (to them), please.” I didn’t have the translator up, so don’t quote me on that.
Ortiz pulls their long - well, it’d be long to me, it would be maybe to their shoulder blades in gravity - wavy dark brown-black hair down over a face of a medium-tan complexion. There’s a few streaks of gray in their hair, mostly that frame their face. Not a lot of gray in the spattering of facial hair they have, though.
“GRACE.” They say, exasperated. “You are going to make me pull out my hair.”
“♪♩♫,♩?”
“Yes. It’s a stress thing. Again.”
“♫♬♩!!!” A sequence of notes I do not recognize, though it’s short and sounds more urgent. I think with the grammatical tone, it’s the Eridian’s name for them?
“Fine!” Ortiz groans and continues. “My compatriot-”
“♪♩♩♬♪♫,♩?” I think this is synonym. Same-different word, technically?
“-my crewmate. My friend. Mi amigo, if you will, though he’s on thin fucking ice-,” another ♩? goes ignored, I chuckle at that - “says he thinks he knows we had some sort of incident with a wormhole. A wormhole, the kind of thing that’s only theoretical and in science. fiction.”
“♫♪.” The Eridian is polite, at least.
“… You’re welcome. Anyways, to whoever is seeing this, whatever we were dealing with - wormhole or not - messed up the Hail Mary in a way I’m not sure…” Ortiz’ eyes search for their next words. “I’m asking that if you are friendly, please check your records for any anomalies that may have occurred, anything, and respond back. We will keep all communication channels open.”
Ortiz closes their eyes and folds their arms over their chest. “If you’re not friendly, guess we’ll die.” They shrug.
There’s a short sequence of chords, then a text-to-speech voice sounds out. “Mary, shield!”
“There are no shields on the Hail Mary.” She replies.
“What, question!! Rocky drama!! No die!”
Ortiz starts to fiddle with the controls. “Nope, we all die, you, me, kaput, dead as hell, Earth, Er-“
The message ends.
“End of message. Would you like to replay it, Dr. Grace?”
I don’t know how long I look at the end frame of the message.
I basically have to force my jaw shut.
“Holy moly…”
I can’t believe what I’m seeing.
“Was that.. another…”
“ANOTHER ERIDIAN, QUESTION?” Rocky exclaims.
I turn around to look at him.
“Grace not hear them, question?! See them, question??”
“I heard some parts but… I guess I’m too used to your voice, I didn’t catch all they said? And they weren’t on the screen, I only saw what looked like another human.”
Rocky excitedly waves his claws. “Was another Eridian! They have different - hm, way of saying words, than where Rocky is from.”
I tap at the computers taped together running our translation software. “Someone who says things differently but in the same language, I’d call that an accent?”
“Yes, yes, different accent, but not big different. They speak to human speaking your language about … it was new word in Eridian. If translate, would be two separate words we have already. Worm and hole. What is worm hole, question?”
Hoo boy.
I lean back in the pilot’s chair. “It’s complicated. The simple idea is that you connect two far points of the fabric of space time with a tunnel of sorts - are you understanding so far?”
“Hm. Not well, but can continue.”
“Hold on.” I look around and grab a loose sheet of paper then pull a pen from my suit pocket.
“Alright, so imagine - you can’t see the dots I’m drawing, but - but let’s say this piece of paper is space, right, well, or time - space time - and there are two points we want to travel between. If we go the long way, the normal way, we have to go aaaallll the way across space,” I say, dragging the pen along the paper. “Distance could be light-years. Long time and a lot of fuel, as we are both personally aware of.
“However!” I continue, holding up my pen, “theoretically, if we could make a wormhole,” I bring the two far ends of the paper together and stab the pen through both dots, “we could travel from point A to point B without having to deal with all the space in between.”
“I hear! Wormhole very convenient. Amaze.”
I shrug and toss the paper aside. “Only if it was anything beyond theory. It’s physics that are…” I grimace. “It’s four dimensional stuff. Probably.” I don't need to explain relativistic physics to Rocky again, and I really don’t need to get into high level theoretical physics.
"Less amaze."
I frown. “Maybe if it was a wormhole, someone could’ve come from Earth… but an Eridian with them just wouldn’t make sense. Could it have been across intrauniversal space-time??”
“...Grace.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense! Unless they’re a terrific actor, they seemed surprised. Why call the ship Hail Mary? An homage? Seems morbid, don’t you think? Wouldn’t they have improved the design?”
“Grace.”
“And the engineer called the Eridian Grace, right? Did I hear someone say Rocky?? There’s… no way. It’s, no, that’s not even worth-”
“GRACE.”
Oops. “Yeah, Rocky?”
“We respond to other Hail Mary, question?”
—---
Holy shit.
Ho-ly shit!
I run a hand through my hair. I thought we were goners. Just absolutely fucking dead in the water. I assumed this, rightfully so, after the alleged wormhole just chewed up us and the Hail Mary and spit us back into space. We got through all the turmoil and pain to get the astrovirus’ predator from the planet’s atmosphere, the whole “each other’s atmospheres almost killed us” thing, ammonia burns, healing from said injuries, and then we just got… wormhole’d. No telling which of those ate all our fuel. Rude.
We actually got a response.
“Rocky waiting, question?”
My hand waivers over the controls for the playback. I don’t know what’s stopping me from just playing it back. I think my hand’s shaking. Fuck, what’s wrong with me?
“Grace can start, if Rocky wants.”
I close my eyes and take a deep breath, opening then again when I exhale. “Yeah,” I nod, “Rocky wants. Go ahead.”
Grace switches his translated English voice back on. “Mary, play video, please.”
“Of course, Grace. Video playback starting.”
Static, before it switches to the response. I see what looks like a similar cockpit to mine. I can’t stop fidgeting with my necklace. I don’t know the man in the video. He sort of looks like he could be familiar, but to be honest I'm not great with faces. He’s white, and I assume American based on the patches that mirror mine on his white flight suit. He doesn’t look much older than me.
“Hello, uh, Ricardo? Ortiz? I’m not sure what you prefer - My name is Dr. Ryland Grace, and I am the scientist and sole survivor of - and this is crazy - of the Hail Mary. Ryland or Grace is fine.” Yeah, American.
Ryland pushes up thin framed glasses. “I haven’t checked any logs or records yet. I wanted to respond first. I’m… mostly confused. If what you experienced truly was a wormhole, then - well, there’s a lot of firsts out here at Tau Ceti!” There’s a small but genuine smile on his face, and it’s infectious.
He throws up a hand, pointer finger extended. “There’s a few things we need to get straight, too. Why are we both on ships named Hail Mary? Where were you originally? Why are you here?”
Ryland looks off screen for a second. “Also, I’m curious about the Eridian you have on your ship?”
My jaw drops.
Another Eridian, mostly brown with greenish spotting, rolls into view, in a polyhedron ball. It’s like the one Grace and I made, with the Eridian xenon alloy he introduced to me. (I hate to admit it, but theirs looks better than ours. Ugh.) The Eridian speaks in familiar sequences of chords and notes, though I don’t catch all of them. I look over to my laptop running my translation software - I think I made it too individually tuned on how Grace says things, because it mostly just catches “Where from” and “names” and other basic nouns and prepositions, then a lot of things that didn’t translate. I make a mental note to fix the code on that.
“Rocky, Rocky, we can’t send a 20 minute video, come on,” Ryland starts gently pushing the Eridian away - whose name is… huh.
“So, last thing, there’s a few things I noticed that you probably noticed too. They’re…”
Ryland stops. “Hm.” He scratches his beard. “I hate to even allude to coincidences meaning correlation. Both named Grace, isn’t that funny? Anyways. We’ll check our logs and will make our way towards you in…” he stops to check a red strapped watch on his left wrist, “Uh, let’s say about an hour. Give us time to check things out and get over to you. We’ll keep our end open if something comes up. Grace and Rocky, out.”
Ryland Grace be damned, whoever this guy is, I’m drawing conclusions to coincidences. I can’t help it. There’s no way that all these things lining up is just coincidence. Are the odds of that even calculable? Technically, sure, but rationally? That two sets of astronauts, sole survivors from Earth and Erid, both on a ship called the Hail Mary? Both named Rocky and Grace?
I lean back in the pilot’s chair. “This is so fucking insane.”
“Other human named Grace, question? And other human call Eridian Rocky?”
“Sounded like it. What are the odds of… another Hail Mary. Another Grace and another Rocky?” I imagine I’d have a better chance of being struck by lightning the same time I win the giga lottery while I also correctly guess an eight number pin code on the first try. This is some monkeys on a typewriter writing Don Quixote probability type of bullshit.
Grace taps a claw on the ground a few times. “Rocky is not their actual name.”
I sit up and look at Grace. “What’s their name, then?”
Grace shrugs a few limbs. “Not have word. Can’t translate like we could with Grace name, or with Rocky fun name.” I’ve been called Rocky since I was a kid, it made sense to let Grace call me that too, even if any of my names translated. Maybe they had a similar rationale?
Hm. “Anything else you can get from what… I guess they’ll be Rocky, too - what Rocky said?”
“They asked about Grace, and name, and you Rocky name. And mission, and … and Erid.” Touchy subject. “Rocky is also engineer. The way them Rocky says words is different than Grace.”
“Oh, do they speak a different language or something?”
Grace shakes his carapace. “No. Eridians have one language.”
“Seriously? That’s crazy. I told you I speak two Earth languages, right? Maybe two and a quarter, if I’m being generous.” My Japanese isn’t good. A quarter is very generous.
“Yes. Eridians have only one language. Happened over many, many, many years - is not important. That Rocky speak Eridian in manner specific to a place on planet.”
“Hm. I think I’d call that a dialect? That’s funny, I could kind of tell where Ryland is from, too. Same general part of the world as me, just some ways away.” He sounds more west coast, compared to my east.
“Interesting. Rocky Grace should fix Mary best we can and check logs again, statement. Other Hail Mary here in 3200 seconds.” Grace says as he starts to half roll, half float away. I’ll push down my pride as the best engineer on this ship - see, that’s a joke, I can make those, thank you - and ask human Doctor Ryland Grace and Eridian Rocky what the deal with their xenon alloy ball is. If they’re anything like us, I’ll probably just direct my questions to the other Rocky.
I crack my knuckles - I can hear Grace complain, he absolutely hates that noise - and unbuckle my restraints. We’ve got some work to do.
-----------
Alright.
There’s a few things.
Well. A lot of things. There’s no dull days out in Tau Ceti as of late, that’s for sure.
We’ve got another ship to deal with. People to deal with. I already went through the whole mental gymnastics routine of I won't see anyone ever again to I won’t see another human person in years, so it's very weird to have to just reverse the things I made peace with there.
I digress. I’ve learned that we’ve got ship to ship communication. Makes sense, I imagine that Earth wanted to talk to everyone on the ship even after it was just the crew on ship. Make sure no last minute “Houston, we have a problem,” issues arise as we left the Earth. I wonder how far away we were before we started the comas. Not like my amnesia has let me remember that part yet, but still.
I start poking around at buttons to bring up screens to get our logs for the other Hail Mary with another pair named Grace and Rocky. (Still very, very weird.) Most everything is normal as of right now. Petrovascope is still out of wack, but I knew that would still be happening as we orbit in and out of the astrophage line around Adrian.
I click through the numbers Mary’s giving us now. Velocity, angles, our fuel is fine, radar - oooh, there we go. An extra blip in the long distance radar that matches where the camera is pointing - an alarm I turned down so that Mary didn’t keep beeping at me that there’s a planet I know is there. According to the log, about an hour ago the two blips showed up out of nowhere. Usually with radar, it starts to appear at the edges because… that’s how traveling a distance works. Usually works. But not with our new blips! Not there, then they were. Then, one of the two goes missing as quickly as it appeared.
Good to have a time stamp. I pull up the external camera that has the Hail Mary Beta (as opposed to our own Hail Mary Prime, we were here first) and push it back to when it first showed up.
The video corrupts out.
What the fudge??
I go frame by frame - one frame there’s nothing else but us and the planet, then next - it’s not completely static, but the visual is scrambled seven ways to Sunday. I can kind of see what’s going on, if I squint, maybe. I obviously don’t know what a real life - gosh, real life! Cheese and rice! - wormhole looks like, but I may just be looking at one. Black hole-esque. Then, as quickly as it showed up, the video resumes as normal, but with the Hail Mary Beta orbiting the planet with it.
“Did not see much. Did Grace?” Rocky has his camera pointed at the screen, but I cannot imagine that the raised surface of his tablet helped him hear anything at all.
“Not much.” I tab over to other logs from that time frame. “Uh, our proximity radar pinged two new objects very briefly, then just one - that’s Hail Mary Beta.”
“Two new objects - other one the worm hole, question?”
“Should have been… if that’s what it was.” The other logs from that few seconds of two blips on the radar are out of wack, too. Fuel is fine as it can be for two jettisoned tanks, but our velocity log has an odd data point. The guidance and control system had an odd period of outliers, too. Also, an external geiger counter had a spike as well.
Very concerning stuff.
“It has been 1800 seconds, Grace.”
“Thanks Rock. Everything strapped in?”
Rocky swaps into the repaired spot he has in the copilot’s seat. “Yes. Would have been quicker if Grace’s side was not very messy.”
I roll my eyes. “I was going to tidy up tomorrow. We weren’t really expecting company out here.”
“Grace say tidy up tomorrow yesterday. Today was tomorrow Grace spoke of then.”
I really hope Rocky gets the point when I stare at him for a few seconds. I get back to buckling myself into my pilot’s harness. “Are you good to go?”
“Besides messy messy Grace, Rocky is ready for time go.”
I roll my eyes and switch our spin drives off. I look over to the cockpit window, our view shifting until it comes to a still, a few loose objects floating in the now zero Gs. I realize I left my pen stabbed through that paper as it floats above my head.
I maneuver Mary over to her twin sister; thankfully, the other is fairly close to us straight ahead, and I don’t need to worry about things like setting the atmosphere and all us of aflame, or turning around to meet them. Proximity alarms really don’t like how close I’m inching towards the other ship, but, y’know, I overrule that. Plus, not to toot my own horn or anything, but I’ve got pretty good at the whole piloting a spaceship thing. Talk about being thrown in the deep end of a pool to learn how to swim. I suppose there must be some muscle memory of the pilot training I surely got.
One thing I learned while reading through Mary’s manual is that there’s a system for small velocity matching adjustments. Who knew? Besides the whole crew who designed this ship, and people who were trained to fly this ship, etc, etc. Good news for me though, since Mary’s computer can make a few miniscule adjustments to match her sister’s velocity exactly.
I notice that the other Hail Mary does not do the same. Their centrifuge is off, and I haven’t seen the spin drives fire once. A conservation of energy, or something else? I guess they know.
Speaking of the other astronauts. They should be close enough so that I can see them through the airlock (which is angled toward them to mirror their own) rather than through my telescope.
I push myself out of the pilot’s seat and promptly bang my head into the ceiling.
“Oh, ffffreaking zero gravity!” I grab my head where I just absolutely bonked it straight into metal. Smooth move, ex lax. You hang out in 1.5Gs for a while and you just forget how to act right in zero Gs.
“Why Grace do that, question?” Rocky says, holding onto the handholds he has. That wasn’t a genuine question, by the way, it was more in the wow, that was stupid thing, if there’s any confusion.
“Why Grace do anything, really.” I push up - down - away from the ceiling back to a point where I can float out of the cockpit and through to the airlock, which I make sure is at the ship’s atmosphere before looking outside the airlock.
The Hail Mary Beta is right there. We got just a little closer than the Blip-A pulled up to Mary originally - like a football field and a half (if my Americanisms will be pardoned, that’s about 150 meters). And, like it should be, there’s their airlock -
Oh.
There’s a flash of color in the airlock window.
There’s the other human.
We’re a little bit far, but there’s another flash of color. I think they waved.
I wave back.
Then they’re gone.
I just have to. I have to float at the airlock for a few seconds to take that in.
“Incoming video communications. Would you like to accept, Dr. Grace?”